Taste
2016 | 16 min | Vietnam
Original title: Vị
Director: Lê Bảo
A young black man arrives in Vietnam dreaming of becoming a footballer. When an injury cuts that future short, he joins an elderly man and several former sex workers living together in an abandoned, darkened kiln. In sixteen surreal minutes, Lê Bảo transforms their hidden refuge into a tactile world of labour, intimacy and exile, the seed from which his later feature Taste would grow.
Unconsoled
2019 | 15 min | Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, France
Director and screenwriter: Lê Bảo
Cinematographer: Tran Ngoc Khuyen
Production designers: Lê Văn Thanh, Ngo Thuy Duyen
Editor: Nguyen Le Hoang Phuc
Sound designer: Vincent Villa
Producers: Ho Hock Doong, Đồng Thị Phương Thảo
In a distant land, a small wooden house lies beneath a layer of blue sand. Inside, a mother and daughter live with a stallion, growing older as they reflect on their family’s traumatic past and absent members. Time seems suspended in Lê Bảo’s hushed, uncanny chamber of memory and loss.
World
2020 | 22 min |Armenia, United States
Original title: Աշխարհ (Ashkhar)
Director and screenwriter: Christine Haroutounian
Cinematographer: Gionatan Tecle
Editors: Christine Haroutounian, Maxwell Schwartz
Sound: Narek Khachatryan, Frank Gaeta
Producers: Christine Haroutounian, Maxwell Schwartz
With: Hasmik Hovian, Marieta Sargsyan
Claudette has moved to a remote Armenian village to care for her bedridden mother. As death approaches, caregiving becomes a messy and disorienting routine of unwanted visitors, bodily realities, sudden desires and flashes of black humour. Refusing sentimental images of devotion, World exposes the fear, resentment and fierce love entwined in the duties of a daughter.
